Seventeen political parties and two alliances are vying for over 100 seats in the Armenian parliament. The opposition alliances led by billionaire Samvel Karapetian and former President Robert Kocharian as well as Gagik Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) are widely regarded as the ruling Civil Contract party’s main challengers. Among other opposition contenders are former human rights ombudsman Arman Tatoyan’s Wings of Unity party, former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress and Edmon Marukian’s Bright Armenia Party.
The elections will be held solely under the system of proportional representation. The parties will need to win at least 4 percent of the vote in order to be represented in the new parliament. The legal threshold for blocs is set at 8 percent.
Pashinian kicked off his party’s election campaign in the southeastern Syunik province, visiting several local towns and villages. As expected, the main theme of his messages to voters there was what he calls peace established between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“We got the opportunity to live, we got the opportunity to be a state, and most importantly, we got the opportunity to pass that state on from generation to generation,” he said, speaking exactly eight years after becoming prime minister during the “velvet revolution” that toppled the country’s former leader, Serzh Sarkisian.
Pashinian’s political opponents portray his track record in power as disastrous. They say that Azerbaijan poses an existential threat to Armenia even after recapturing Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and clinching territorial and other concession from Yerevan. They claim that Pashinian will make further concessions to Baku if he again wins reelection.
“Almost nothing has changed [since 2018,] only our country has gotten smaller,” Karapetian’s nephew and right-hand man Narek said during his Strong Armenia bloc’s first campaign meeting held outside the parliament building in Yerevan.
The 60-year-old billionaire and philanthropist, who has made his fortune in Russia, is not allowed to physically attend campaign rallies because of being under house arrest on what he calls politically motivated charges brought against him almost a year ago. Narek Karapetian insisted that Strong Armenia is aiming for an election victory despite these “unequal conditions.”
The tycoon decided to enter politics following his controversial arrest in June last year. Under the Armenian constitution, he cannot become prime minister or even parliament deputy because of also having Russian and Cypriot citizenships. His bloc has pledged to remove this constitutional hurdle in case of defeating Pashinian’s party.
Senior Civil Contract members signaled earlier this year concerns that the three opposition forces could collectively win a majority in the next parliament and thus oust Pashinian. They said at the same time that the country’s leadership “will not allow” such an outcome, stoking media speculation that at least some of the opposition heavyweights could be disqualified from the race.
Although they all have been registered by the Central Election Commission, Armenian law allows the body headed by a Pashinian ally to ask courts to disqualify contenders accused by it of systematic vote buying or campaign financing irregularities. In recent weeks, dozens of Strong Armenia members and supporters have been detained on charges of bribing voters strongly denied by Karapetian’s bloc. The Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) made several more such arrests on Thursday and Friday.
Pashinian’s political team itself is accused by various opposition groups of trying to buy votes with public money as well as through a private charity run by the premier’s wife, Anna Hakobian. No Civil Contract party member is known to have been prosecuted on corresponding charges.
